Simone Vaudry

One evening at a ball, Count Georg de Clermont-Latour—a man who places great importance on convention and traditional notions of honor—surprises a young man in his wife Odette’s bedchamber. Despite her protestations that she had rebuffed the presumptuous youth and behaved with neither impropriety nor infidelity, her husband refuses to believe a word she says and casts her out of his home.

Marcello, a shy tenor, is afraid of singing in public. Two friends of his think of having an elegant youth on the stage pretending to be singing while Marcello dubs him behind the scenes. The scam is successful but after a while Marcello summons the courage to go on stage himself.

Bouboule, a shoeshine boy at a Parisian train station, is about to discover a revolutionary shoe polish. Unfortunately, due to a series of misunderstandings, he loses his job. But at the same time, he wins a fabulous sum in the lottery. From then on, shoe polish is back in the spotlight…

A young man, having seduced his friend's mistress, undertakes to leave his wife to the latter for one night, when he is married. A few years later, the friend claims his due and the young man introduces him to his so-called wife.

A working-class couple with four children live in extreme poverty in a rear building. When the woman becomes pregnant again, she goes to a young doctor and asks him to terminate the pregnancy, as the child would be too much of a burden for her. The doctor refuses to perform the procedure because it is against the law, so she has the abortion herself and dies in the process. The public prosecutor has the man arrested and the four children are left to fend for themselves. The prosecutor's fiancée, a young teacher, lives in the front building. When she is raped and becomes pregnant in her apartment by the porter's wife's mentally disturbed son, the doctor, deeply affected by the case of the working-class couple, performs an illegal abortion on the teacher and confronts the public prosecutor with the case of his own fiancée. The public prosecutor resigns because he can no longer reconcile his office with his conscience.

A man lives a normal family life during the day, but late evening he becomes a different person, taken to night-clubs and their attractions of songs and bohemia.